Last Train Home

A collection of stories from the margins of American life

Wayne Creed’s debut collection pulls no punches. These are stories about people surviving on the edges—Eastern Shore watermen whose lives have collapsed, the junkies and car thieves marking time, and the wheelchair-bound and forgotten trying to carve out meaning in a world that’s moved on without them.

Written with unflinching honesty and surprising lyricism, Last Train Home maps the forgotten corners of life where loneliness mingles with grace, violence brushes against tenderness, and the desperate search for connection plays out in dive bars, detention centers, and abandoned churches. Creed’s characters—ex-nuns and altar boys, teachers and drifters, boxers and bell ringers—navigate worlds where the American Dream has curdled into something darker, yet somehow, improbably, moments of beauty still break through.

Raw, lyrical, and uncompromising, Last Train Home announces a bold new voice in American fiction—one unafraid to look directly at what we’d rather turn away from. From fishing villages to the streets of Moscow, Creed finds in the darkest corners the beauty and persistence of the human spirit. Last Train Home offers no easy answers—only the hard truth that grace sometimes arrives on the last train, just before the station closes for good.

The Odyssey of a Bad Mother

I’m going to spend 2026 in 1982; come join me.

The Odyssey of a Bad Mother takes place in 1982 in Bellevue, Washington, right outside of Seattle.

Come reminisce about the time of Pop Rocks, Tab, Hall & Oates, Heather Locklear, E.T., Reaganomics, and the changing of the family dynamic.

Set against the backdrop of Bill Gates’s rise and MS-DOS and the European expansion of Microsoft, finally to their home in Redmond. The Odyssey of a Bad Mother takes a look at three flawed women in the affluent Parkside community who are all deemed bad mothers.

They come together in a desperate quest to find answers to the kidnapping of one of their sons, a local boy, Ryan McKinnon. With no clues, no answers, and little hope, these three bad mothers forge the path to finding what happened to him.

During a time when the police were on overload, a time in American history when children’s kidnappings were becoming prominent in the United States, and with respect to the milk carton campaign, The Odyssey of a Bad Mother takes a hard look at the police and their fight to bring Ryan McKinnon home.

What happened to Ryan McKinnon that night at the movies when he went missing?

With Ryan as the narrator of the terrifying tale, his story sheds light on compassion, empathy, and psychological insight on what it means to struggle, self-preserve, fall apart, and pick yourself up again for the greater good!

A Southern Noir

Hunter Landon, a private investigator in Birmingham, Alabama, lives a life defined by faith, family, and unwavering values. This seemingly idyllic Southern city is his home, a picturesque backdrop to a devout existence alongside his wife and children. But when a new case lands on his desk, Hunter’s world is brutally shattered, which challenges everything he professes to believe.

He plunges into a maze of love, betrayal, and cold-blooded murder, swiftly uncovering the decay beneath Birmingham’s polished façade. The polite society he knows is a thin veneer, barely concealing a sinister darkness. Confronted with these unsettling truths, Hunter faces an impossible choice: remain true to the man he is, or become the very monster he hunts to solve the case.

In a world where no one is who they claim to be, can a good man survive in the shadows he uncovers?

Look Back Detective

Twenty-five years after Hatchel Breeze’s most infamous homicide case, another one is thrust upon him, and this one involves his family. As he investigates, he comes to believe it has the marks of the first case and revenge all over it. But things are not always as they seem. Detective Hatchel Breeze, a hometown boy and lifelong cop and detective and now assistant chief about to retire, is called to investigate his last case. What he finds is a family he does not know and enemies all around. One misstep and his most cherished family members’ lives could end. Yet as always, he persists to find the killer before his final retirement date, revisiting his mistakes and lost loves along the way.This is the second of three Hatchel Breeze detective novels.

Where the Water Falls

Seeking purpose in life is like finding your way through a dark room, as Hunter Strong finds out the hard way. Although he finds comfort in his routine, he senses a missing piece and becomes determined to find out what that is! With the help from his mentor, Marge, and his new friend, James, Hunter embarks on a bigger life journey than he thought. Along the way, he’d have to face the shadows of his past to find what he seeks.

Where the Water Falls is a narrative highlighting the vagaries of life. Without a set of instructions as a guide, this becomes a life-changing experience. Not only to the people in Hunter’s life but also providing a fresh new perspective to Hunter himself. The experience is in the journey; the destination is merely a junction or transition. Life keeps flowing like a river, even at moments where the water falls.

The Timkens of San Diego

Rising from a blacksmith’s apprentice to become king of the roller bearing, Henry Timken was one of the 19^th century’s greatest inventors.

His early engineering of axles, springs, and ball bearings for horse-drawn carriages made him rich. But his 1898 patent of a tapered roller bearing revolutionized transportation and made the German immigrant and his family uber rich.

In 1887, with his greatest invention still ahead of him, Timken retired to San Diego with his wife, Fredericka, and four of their five children. All would become wealthy from his patents and lead lives that often cast them in the nation’s headlines.

The three daughters made their niche in the art world.

Amelia founded the San Diego Museum of Art and resuscitated the symphony. Georgia studied art in Paris and St. Louis and married her art teacher. Eight of her paintings hang in the National Gallery of Art.

Cora became an ardent painter and a major collector of art from Persia, China, and India. The Metropolitan Museum of Art lists 133 objects from her. At age 47 she married an osteopathic doctor-scientist 15 years younger who was obsessed with the idea of curing illnesses through electromagnetism.

The sons, H.H. and W.R., took turns running the Timken empire and expanding it globally. H.H. became one of the wealthiest men in America.

The Fuzzy Bumblebee

In this thoughtful Clarke Fable, your child will learn the lesson of appreciating others for who they are. The fuzzy bumblebee comes to understand that he shares a sameness and a difference from those who are around him.

Don’t forget to look for the Fuzzy Little Bumblebee who appears on each page!

Martita and the Last of the Muldoon Dragons

Stephanie Rivera tells a beautiful story of pride and forgiveness. Brave seven-year-old Martita and her new diminutive friend step in to help a young dragon discover courage he didn’t know he had. Excitement and friendship abound in this heartwarming story—complete with breathtaking illustrations by Brooke Musselman—that preserves the honorable lineage of the Muldoon Dragons.

Love Bites...Sometimes Too

This is the second story, the follow-up to Love Bites…Sometimes. Bryce and his new fiancé vampire have moved to a new small town. They think of themselves as safe and getting ready to plan their dream wedding, not realizing that someone from the past is still following them. But whose past is it, and why are they stalking them?

With his new awakening powers and abilities, Bryce’s fiancé is seeing and feeling a new terrifying threat looming and stalking them. This mysterious figure is using old friends as targets and puppets, as well as new mysterious attacks that threaten to expose them. Or is this mysterious new shrouded figure after something else even more sinister?

With the help of new/old friends and a relative, they discover new secrets and with new powers developing, will it be enough? This dark and mysterious figure seems to have an alley as well, also from Bryce’s dark family’s past. Will finding this dark figure’s ally identity lead them to find out who is stalking them?

Reflections of My Soul

Experience life through my eyes and my perspective of the way things are or might be.

Through my poems I challenge the reader to live my reality as I see it. Step into the twists and turns of my mind. Imagine stepping into my dreams, experiences, and nightmares. The trick is to find your way out again.

The Plum Thief

As Pan American World Airways teetered on bankruptcy, could the shah of Iran provide the capital to restore it to solvency? Or would his financial bailout endanger the lives of Pan Am’s executives because a religious revolution is brewing?

The Plum Thief is the turbulent story of activists who forged a new government in the 1970s by battling Western businessmen in their efforts to topple the shah of Iran. Told from the little guy’s point of view, here’s a tale of indoctrination, as characters in The Plum Thief perform increasingly violent historic events, where heady success is achieved only through peril and risk of death. It’s the story of secret police, clerics with weapons, oil bureaucrats, and the US Congress. It poses the lingering question: Can the rules of faith serve as the rules of law?

The Plum Thief reveals author James Roman’s personal involvement with Iran’s religious revolution, also including such recognizable names as Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Ayatollah Khomeini, and more. Here is historic fact, disclosing how Iran, once America’s steadfast ally, evolved in this new world order.

UnAssigned

Stuck in prison while dreaming of the ocean is how Dr. Savannah Dawson is spending her time in Cape Town. At least that’s true on business days while she works as a physician at the overcrowded penitentiary. But her freedom also remains at risk from Casper, the invisible head of the CIA. Hoping that this assignment might be their last, Savannah and her best friend Lacey work to break free another operative stuck behind bars and caught in the web of their unfriendly ghost of a boss. In order to accomplish this problematic jailbreak, they have to enlist the help of their crew of friends: Charlee, the best lawyer they know, and Karmen, the most cunning IT guru on the planet. But the four of them soon realize this assignment isn’t exactly what it seems, and they are really being exploited for the ultimate cover-up. When the tides turn and they find themselves the ones hiding and hunted, they have to decide to run or fight.